Europe has never been as committed to democracy as the United States. Its elites let people vote, but some issues they are not willing to allow to be decided by the masses. Thus, at quite an early stage, European liberals decided that immigration was too explosive an issue to be committed to the democratic process. Europeans were going to get mass immigration whether they wanted it or not, and anyone with reservations about that decision was deemed part of the “far right”.

This stratagem has mostly succeeded, at least temporarily. Few if any mainstream parties have been willing to oppose, or even question, mass non-European immigration. This left the large number of Europeans who wanted their countries to remain more or less as they have been, unrepresented, except by upstart parties that may or may not be “far right” on any issue other than immigration. The danger, obviously, is that by consigning the immigration issue to the “far right”, Europe’s elites may inadvertently, and needlessly, strengthen the otherwise insignificant elements that are, actually, far right.

In Germany, no mainstream party has been willing to stand up to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s importation of nearly a million immigrants and refugees, nearly all Muslims. So opposition has come from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which was founded in 2013 as a Euro-skeptic party, but now has taken on the immigration issue. Germany’s national election took place today, and the main story line [from the Star Tribune] is AfD’s strong showing:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel won a fourth term Sunday, but now faces the tricky prospect of forming a coalition with two disparate new partners after voters weakened her conservatives and a nationalist, anti-migrant party surged into parliament.

Merkel’s center-left challenger, Martin Schulz, conceded that his Social Democrats had suffered a “crushing election defeat”, with projections showing the party’s worst performance in post-World War II Germany.

That’s a good thing.

The biggest winner was the four-year-old Alternative for Germany, or AfD. It finished third after a campaign that centered on shrill criticism of Merkel and her decision in 2015 to allow large numbers of migrants into Germany, but also harnessed wider discontent with established politicians.

AfD got 13% of the vote. Germany’s “discontent with established politicians” was reflected in the fact that both Merkel’s center-right Christian Democrats and the center-left Social Democrats saw their vote totals decline substantially.

So is AfD really a far right party? The left-wing BBC bitterly opposes anti-immigration parties like AfD and tries to put the party in a bad light, for the most part unsuccessfully:

AfD also adopted some of Pegida’s anti-establishment rhetoric, for example the slogan “Lügenpresse” (“lying press”), which has echoes of the Nazi era.

Apparently you can’t question the establishment press without being a Nazi. Some American liberals say the same thing, but no one believes them.

AfD argues that Germany must set up a new border police force. Frauke Petry, who stepped aside from the AfD leadership earlier this year, even said German police should “if necessary” shoot at migrants seeking to enter the country illegally.

This tells us what we already knew, that AfD is anti-immigration. The BBC evidently considers the idea of shooting at people trying illegally to enter Germany shocking. But if people insist on entering a country despite that country’s laws, isn’t shooting them “if necessary” the last resort? Isn’t that why border guards are pretty much always armed? A country whose border guards could do no more than wave at foreigners and implore them not to enter the country would not – to put it mildly – have secure borders.

AfD says that “Islam does not belong to Germany”. …

AfD would ban foreign funding of mosques in Germany, ban the burka (full-body veil) and the Muslim call to prayer, and put all imams through a state vetting procedure. …

Those proposals wouldn’t fly in the U.S., but they cannot fairly be considered extreme. AfD has, however, had some unsavory moments unrelated to immigration:

Mr[Alexander] Gauland [an AfD leader] drew criticism for declaring that Germans should be “proud” of their soldiers in both world wars. While SS units were notorious for German atrocities in World War Two, the regular armed forces also committed many war crimes.

Earlier another top AfD politician, Björn Höcke, caused outrage by condemning the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. He told supporters that Germans were the “only people in the world who planted a memorial of shame in the heart of their capital”.

At least he admits to the shame!

Whether these few comments by AfD leaders are symptomatic of an underlying neo-Nazi tendency, I don’t know. To the extent that they may be, it illustrates the peril of suppressing and stigmatizing discussion of Germany’s immigration policies – which are, in my view, extreme and ill-advised. Doing so inevitably drives voters who are opposed to mass Islamic immigration into the arms of the only political leaders who are willing to give voice to their concerns.

If the only party opposing the gradual conquest of Germany by Islam is an anti-Semitic party, the issue of anti-Semitism falls away; because Islam is more anti-Semitic than any contemporary European party.

Could even civil war save Western Europe from becoming Islamic in this century?

It is hard to see how Angela Merkel’s work can be undone. She is not just one of the great destroyers in world history, she is probably the greatest of them all. Because what she is destroying is the greatest civilization in world history: the post-Enlightenment civilization of Europe and the West.

European political leaders not only refuse to resist the Islamization of their countries, increasingly they positively encourage it. Add to this a high Muslim fertility rate and a very low rate among indigenous Europeans, and you may be certain Muslims will become a majority on the continent in this century unless something – civil war, perhaps – interrupts the processes already set in motion.

The flow of illegal migrants does not stop. They land on the Greek islands along the Turkish coast. They still try to get into Hungary, despite a razor wire fence and mobilized army. Their destination is Germany or Scandinavia, sometimes France or the UK. Some of them still arrive from Libya. Since the beginning of January, more than 620,000 have arrived by sea alone. There will undoubtedly be many more: a leaked secret document estimates that by the end of December, there might be 1.5 million.

Journalists in Western Europe continue to depict them as “refugees” fleeing war in Syria. The description is false. According to statistics released by the European Union, only twenty-five percent of them come from Syria; the true number is probably lower. The Syrian government sells passports and birth certificates at affordable prices. The vast majority of migrants come from other countries: Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Eritrea, Somalia, and Nigeria.

Many do not seem to have left in a hurry. Many bring new high-end smartphones and large sums of cash, ten or twenty thousand euros, sometimes more. Many have no passports, no ID, and refuse to give fingerprints.

Whenever people flee to survive, the men come with whole families: women, children, elders. Here, instead, more than 75% of those who arrive are men under 50; few are women, children or elders.

As Christians are now the main targets of Islamists (the Jews fled or were forced out decades ago), the people escaping the war in Syria should be largely composed of Christians. But Christians are a small minority among those who arrive, and they often hide that they are Christians.

Those who enter Europe are almost all Muslims, and behave as some Muslims often do in the Muslim world: they harass Christians and attack women. In reception centers, harassing Christians and attacking women are workaday incidents. European women and girls who live near reception centers are advised to take care and cover up. Rapes, assaults, stabbings and other crimes are on the rise.

Western European political leaders could tell the truth and act accordingly. They do not. They talk of “solidarity”, “humanitarian duty”, “compassion”. From the beginning, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said that illegal migrants were welcome: she seemed to change her mind for a moment, but quickly slid back. In France, President François Hollande says the same things as Angela Merkel.

After the heartbreaking image of a dead child being carried on a Turkish beach was published, thousands of Germans and French initially spoke the same way as their leaders. Their enthusiasm seems to have faded fast.

The people of Central Europe were not enthusiastic from the beginning. Their leaders seem to share the feelings of their populations. None spoke as explicitly as Viktor Orbán, Prime Minister of Hungary. He said out loud what many of his countrymen seemed to think.

Orbán decribed the “massive and brutal” entry of the migrants into his country as an “invasion”, and said that “a country has the right to decide who is allowed to enter its territory, and to guard its borders”. He also dared to point out that the invaders are from a “different culture”, and that Islamic values “might not be compatible” with European values.

To which Western European leaders reacted with predictable (and surely irrational or even insane) fury.

Western European political leaders harshly condemned his remarks and the attitude of Central Europe in general. They decided to take a hard line approach, including: forcing recalcitrant countries to welcome immigrants, setting up mandatory quotas that define how many immigrants each EU country must receive, and threatening those countries that declined to obey. Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament, said that Europe was built in a spirit of “burden sharing”, and that EU breakup was a risk that could not be excluded.

An acute division, in fact, is emerging between the leaders of Western Europe and the leaders of Central Europe. Another division is growing between the populations of Western Europe and their leaders. …

Any criticism of Islam in Europe is treated as a form of racism, and “Islamophobia” is considered a crime or a sign of mental illness.

Islam … is creating increasingly distressing problems that are almost never brought to light. Muslim criminality across Europe is high. Consequently, the percentage of Muslims in prisons in Europe is high. In France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, the prison population is 70% Muslim. Many European prisons have become recruitment centers for future jihadis.

Muslim riots may occur for any reason: police upholding the law, a Soccer League celebration, or in support of a cause.

Populations of Western Europe increasingly think that … their leaders speak and act as if they have no awareness of what is happening.

Central European leaders and their people, who have directly experienced authoritarian rule, seem to be thinking that entering the European Union was a huge mistake. When the Soviet Union collapsed, they became members of the EU to join what was called then the “free world”. They do not seem willing to be subjected again to coercive decisions made by outsiders.

After living under the Soviet yoke, they preserved their desire for freedom and self-government, and evidently will not now agree to give them up. They know what submission to Islam could mean. Bulgaria and Romania were occupied by the Ottoman Empire until 1878. Hungary was under the boot of Ottoman rule for more than a hundred and fifty years (1541-1699).

Polls show that a majority of Muslims living in Europe want the application of sharia law and clearly reject any idea of assimilation.

Hundreds of thousands of Muslims living in Europe have joined fundamentalist Islamic organizations. Thousands have joined jihadist movements and are now fighting in Syria or Yemen. Many have returned and are ready to act against Europe.

Illegal Muslim migrants are likely to join the Muslims already living in Europe; and they will remain Muslim. They will live on social benefits until the bankruptcy of welfare states. They will reside in the “no-go zones,” and the “no-go zones” will continue to grow. Their occupants come from countries where Christians and women are mistreated; in Europe, they are already mistreating Christians and women.

They come from countries where Western civilization is despised and where hatred of Jews is inescapable — and this remains so among Muslims already living in Europe. For more than two decades, almost all assaults against Jews in Europe were committed by Muslims. …

A project to overwhelm Europe by a huge wave of migration was described by the Islamic State in documents discovered this February. It is hard to rule out that the Islamic State plays a role in what is happening. Turkish authorities are ignoring the massive departures taking place from their coast. If they really wanted the current process to stop, they could stop it. That is clearly not what they do. The Islamic State could not survive without Turkish help. Daily flights on Turkish Airlines bring illegal migrants to Istanbul; they continue unhindered to Europe. …

In all 28 countries of the European Union, birth rates are low and the population is aging. People under thirty account for only 16% of the population, or 80 million people. In the 22 Arab countries, plus Turkey and Iran, people under thirty account for 70% of the population, or 350 million people.

Jews are fleeing Europe in increasing numbers. “Native” Europeans are starting to flee as well.

In 1972, in his book The Camp of the Saints, French writer Jean Raspail described flooding Europe with Muslim migrants crossing the Mediterranean. At the time, the book was a work of fiction. Today, it is reality.